Zen is to utterly deconstruct, disassemble and reconceptualise Self and Mind. It is difficult medicine but the mischievous enigma at the core of all of our problems is our Self. Decentralised psychological subjectivity and cultural presence is one in which adversarial competition is dissolved as there is no foundational differentiation between persons, property or places.Utopias,…
Creativity, Nature and Our Global Disconnect
What is the aggregate consequence of so (very) many people spending most of their lives in concrete and glass labyrinths, bound. Where (almost) all stimulus and perception is normalised, by regularity, uniformity, aspiration to control through linear precedent, by axiomatic illumination of certainty (such as it is) and knowledge, there is little room for the…
Arms Race in Space: Governance of Technology or Technology of Governance?
I fear that the introduction of rules, prescriptive boundaries and frameworks will not inhibit the militarisation of this context so much as positively incentivise it, the culture and history of adversarial psychology being what it is. A line must certainly be drawn in the sand, but it seems that most of these (kinds of) prohibitions…
Artificial Intelligence and a Fallacy of Complete Knowledge
An unremitting curiosity of human psychology and culture is that, from about the time - perhaps of the Industrial Revolution (?) - when we acquired a degree of distributed and self-conscious awareness of the extent and consequence of our own procedural and developmental technological progress, each significant iteration has been regarded as the end of…
Information Entropy and Psychological Desensitisation in Culture and Art
When the recombinatory convergence of once-distant or disparate symbols no longer shocks us, it is probably not merely because the world (and it's inhabitants) have moved on and desensitised to the essential information entropy of difference. It is because these once dissonant symbols share some deeper (and logical) bond. The cultural and psychological self-representation of…
Fractal Fire and Microcosm
We rarely perceive that each action, experience and event is always in some way a microcosm, deeply entangled with (and symptomatic of) a much broader and more complex world. In each notionally separate event, entity or artefact we might seek to discover a Global truth hidden, encrypted, but still standing there in plain sight.
The Simple Joys of (an) Everyday Emptiness
How strange it is that we should all spend our lives in pursuit of some idealised goal of perfect self-abstraction, of well-defined subjectivity and psychological closure when everything we learn on this journey of life informs us that this is in fact impossible. We learn by entrainment and enculturation that we should abhor and shum…
Cyber: Technology, Information, Identity and Conflict
...as a general observation: All of this (shared) online aspiration to reflexively self-validating identity-construction and participatory meaning-generation masks a howling vacuum of dissimulated subjectivity. We seek self-expression but no such endpoint exists, no epistemogical closure or certainty and (certainly) nothing even vaguely approximating to that monster-image of projected, illusory control that stares back at us…
Predators, Machines and Co-evolution
For many years now, I have been fascinated by the mischievous, mysterious relationship between material systems (like living organisms) and the astoundingly complex information abstractions, systems and relationships within which they quite literally swim. I have mentioned parasitic wasps before - in a related context - but encountered an interesting article today which got me…
Defining Intelligence
The intransigent difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently concise, compelling, universally agreed-upon and resilient definition of intelligence sits somewhere on the same geometric arc or architecture of axiomatic assertion as does complexity and, indeed, life. If epistemological closure is demonstrably (ref. paradoxes of self-containment, among other things) impossible, intelligence both can and can not (!) be…
Internet Narratives, Self-propagating Complexity and Adversarial Evolution
Some philosophical thoughts on these contemporary, massively-distributed online communications systems:• social media now (largely) subsumes news media and the powerful, potentially unmanageable, flow and form of recursively self-propagating information-processing systems is such that even putatively reputable media or news channels - not to mention governments - are forced to contort themselves and their narratives in…
Online Communication: Talking Underwater
All of this online communication really feels a bit like trying to talk (or shout) underwater; no one can hear us and no one is really listening or paying attention anyway. The greatest misdirection and deception of this is that while we are (all) here pouring our hearts and minds out into this digital information…
